By Teresa Daniell
In the recently published text, Visible Borders, Invisible Economies: Living Death in Latinx Narratives, Kristy L. Ulibarri uses an interplay of various genres–prose, photographs, and films–within the framework of Foucauldian biopolitics and Achille Mbembe’s theories of necropolitics to examine how political visibility, particularly in terms of immigration policy and border protection operations, reveals the economic invisibility of exploitative and often violent practices. Ulibarri’s intent is to make visible the economic realities around (im)migrant lives in a country where security at the national borders serves the dual purpose of letting commodities in while keeping certain bodies out.
The first three chapters of Visible Borders, Invisible Economies work to unwrap how Latinx cultural narratives show the inherent violence within national borders and capitalist globalization.
In chapter one, Ulibarri’s discussion centers on three documentary narratives to highlight the popular discourse of immigration as a “brown peril” (66) to U.S. citizens. Ulibarri’s thoughtful analysis of each of these texts reveal the economic conditions or the “actual material conditions” (35) hidden in that political discourse: death and detention at the border and social death for the undocumented immigrant.
Examining various photographic projects in chapter two, Ulibarri turns from documenting “national imaginaries” to documenting the “paradoxes of these national imaginaries in the era of globalization” (69). She opens the chapter with a photograph that portrays a group of Latinx women and men running across a southern California highway. The photograph is emblematic of the paradox of national security that Ulibarri deftly conveys. From one perspective these are people running toward a better life in the U.S; from a more xenophobic perspective the image paints the picture of invading foreigners.
The Border Film Project is particularly interesting within Ulibarri’s interplay between visibility and invisibility. The project is “a collaborative endeavor that gave disposable cameras to undocumented workers crossing the US-Mexico desert and to the US Minutemen militias trying to stop them” (84). Ulibarri observes that the photographs of the migrants conveyed friendship and joy in contrast to the Minutemen’s photographs which tended to highlight cliched political ideologies. Ulibarri’s analysis in this chapter depicts the complexity of the border and the lives that are impacted by it.
In chapter three, Ulibarri examines three films, using them as commentary on the lived realities of Latinx immigrants. Two of the films depict Latinx lives as enslaved by a capitalistic economy while one of them depicts Latinx lives controlled by political discourse. Ulibarri uses these films effectively to extract a sense of the literal as well as social death of Latinx immigrants.
Ulibarri turns to a political discussion of Latinx narratives in chapters four and five where she focuses on the criticality of politics of death in these narratives and the “social formations possible under the violence of capitalism” (28).
In chapter four, Ulibarri’s featured works include a short story and a novel, both of which tell of immigrants who become labor captives, and an examination of a comic book that depicts a zombie as the superhero. While these narratives depict the “violence of the market,” (146), Ulibarri sees “subversive potential” (146) in their endings as the laborers ultimately find freedom. This chapter represents a turning point from Ulibarri’s bleak assessment of immigrant lived experiences to a glimmer of hope in those subversive potentials.
In chapter five, Ulibarri highlights literature that complicates the binary structures so prevalent in the U.S. To explore parodies of the superhero trope she examines a young-adult fiction novel as well as a photographic project that presents migrants as superheroes as they perform their everyday jobs. Ulibarri also leverages a performance art piece which takes its content from community experiences. In highlighting the images of world-shattering and world-building of the hero tropes she examines in chapter five, Ulibarri does not intend to sweep away immigrant lived experiences with exploitation and death she outlined in the first part of Visible Borders, Invisible Economies. Instead she circles back to her introduction where she states her intention to consider how “the neoliberal state can secure free-market ideals, such as individual liberty, for some, hyperregulate, exploit, or criminalize others” (6-7). Significantly, Ulibarri’s last chapter focuses on Latinx ability to shatter the political narrative of “brown peril” to heroes in the U.S. economy whose everyday work drives and sustains our economy.
Visible Borders, Invisible Economies ends with some reflections on deportation practices and discourses because deportation in the US “tells us something about the world we are living and dying in” (181). Ulibarri notes that most Latinx literature sees deportation in negative terms because of broken promises and human rights violations. However, Ulibarri examines two Latinx narratives that depict transformative experiences for deported individuals and thus show some redeeming value in deportation.
This largely dark examination of a neoliberalized market on Latinx lives ends with a positive note: the ambivalence imbedded in the narratives Ulibarri analyzes offer an alternative to the “simple black-and-white binaries that present the social order” and show that “the living dead, however, are building underworlds” (190).
Ulibarri offers a model for reading other Latinx literature in the context of rising immigrant detentions. Through the lenses of bio- and necro-politics, she explores who dies, socially, politically, and economically as well as bodily so that others may live and thrive. The interplay of border visibility and economic invisibility reveals a politically charged truth about the disposability of immigrant life hidden within the auspices of border/national security. Further, these truths are visible in the imagined world of art be it prose, photography, or film.
Dr. Teresa Daniell received her PhD in Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research interests include Latinx, Veteran, and Native American Studies.